***** SHAW & CARR-HILL **** EJC/REC Vol. 2, No. 1, 1991 ***
MASS MEDIA AND ATTITUDES TO THE GULF WAR IN BRITAIN*
Martin Shaw and Roy Carr-Hill
University of Hull
Abstract. During the Gulf War, the US-led
coalition was able to exercise unprecedented
control over news coverage of the war. Most
television and press coverage in the United
Kingdom, as elsewhere, systematically minimized
the violence which was taking place. National
opinion polls, commissioned by the media, reported
overwhelming support for the war. This article
reports on two surveys of a local population in
Northern England, based on random samples of the
electorate, which were designed to test how fully
such headline poll findings represented the
feelings of people about the war. It argues that
while perceptions of the war closely reflected the
pictures of the war provided by the media, there
was a great deal of anxiety not reflected in
national poll findings, and "resistance" to media
coverage -- reflected particularly in the finding
that large minorities agreed that television and
the popular press "glorified the war too much."
The article explores the influence of newspaper
readership, finding this a sharper differentiator
of attitudes than age, sex, class, party
affiliation, or experience of war and the
military. The authors conclude that attitudes to
the war, and the influence of mass media, were
both more complex and more contradictory than most
opinion polls suggested during the conflict.
Media and Warfare
The public debate about media and warfare has been
bedeviled by propositions of simple, unilinear effects. On
the one hand, it has been widely believed, especially by
political and military leaders, that television and other
media tend -- left to themselves -- to undermine war
efforts. The source of this belief is the myth that
television coverage of the Vietnam War undermined popular
support for the war in the USA and elsewhere in the Western
world, and hence contributed to the Americans' defeat in
that war. This myth has been shown by academic research to
be based on dubious arguments and information,[1] but it has
remained influential among government leaders and military
planners. It clearly inspired the extremely tight and
apparently successful control of information and media
access by the UK in the Falklands/Malvinas War, which was in
turn copied by the USA in the invasions of Grenada and
Panama. These smaller operations then provided the models
for the news management of Operations Desert Shield and
Desert Storm in 1990-91.
The alternative simplification of the relationship of
media and warfare, which gains credibility from precisely
these efforts of state authorities to manipulate media for
their own ends, is the critical version according to which
media function simply to reproduce the requirements of
power. Just as official doctrines give too much credibility
to the critical effects of media in order to maximize the
case for control, however, so critical doctrines sometimes
give too much credibility to the manipulative successes of
governments, militaries and media controllers.
Sophisticated variants of the latter thesis are to be
found in some of the sociological theories of contemporary
militarism, which emphasize that in a society which has
moved beyond mass militarism (a "post-military society," as
one of us has described it elsewhere[2]), mediated images of
weapons and war are central to the social consumption of
military power. According to Mann, for example, popular
militarism now takes a "spectator sport" form, in which
members of Western societies consume war as
entertainment.[3] Similarly, Luckham argues that we have an
"armament culture," in which images of weaponry are diffused
by mass media into popular culture, just as it becomes
central to armed forces and international relations
themselves.[4]
Such theories have two manifest weaknesses, which Shaw
has discussed more fully in the book referred to above.[5]
First, like so many theories of media, they concentrate on
the production rather than on the consumption of mediated
images. And second, although Mann has extended his argument
to actual war situations -- arguing provocatively that in
terms of the presentation of weaponry in the media, "wars
like the Falklands or the Grenada invasion are not
qualitatively different from the Olympic Games"[6] -- these
theories are primarily based on the role of images and ideas
of war in peacetime situations, not during actual conflicts.
These theoretical issues have reverberated in British
studies of the media during the Falklands War. On the one
hand, the Glasgow University Media Group, who carried out a
content analysis of television news coverage, argued that
"we have here a situation in which television selectively
informs people's attitudes, then selectively reports on what
those attitudes are, and finally ... uses this version of
public opinion to justify its own approach to reporting."[7]
The Glasgow group gave credence to conflicts within the
media, and between the media and the state, chiefly to the
extent that they saw journalists arguing that they rather
than the state should be the agents of control. Morrison
and Tumber, on the other hand, who conducted an ethnographic
study of Journalists at War, saw many genuine tensions
between and among reporters and editors pursuing
journalistic goals on the one hand and military and
political would-be censors on the other. They also carried
out audience research, which showed these conflicts
extending among viewers and readers. They concluded that
the war had been an important test of "popular broadcasting
culture" in Britain, with its central notions of the
autonomy of broadcasting from political control.[8] This
research represented a movement towards a more sophisticated
framework for analyzing the role of media in war.
The present study also rejects the often simplistic
terms in which debate about media and warfare has been
polarized. It is based on a perspective which emphasizes
that, within a framework of complex and unequal power
relations between political/military authorities, media
controllers and journalists, and the public as consumers of
media products, both conflict and more subtle
differentiation occur over the issues raised by war. This
paper looks at the "consumer" end of the role of media in
the Gulf: it presents and analyzes evidence of the
differentiation of attitudes to the war, the role of
television and especially newspaper readership in forming
these attitudes, and of attitudes to the media coverage
itself. In order to contextualize this discussion, however,
we begin with a (necessarily schematic) examination of media
coverage in the war.
The Mediation of Violence in the Gulf Conflict
Each war is prepared for in terms of the last
comparable previous conflict. For the USA, Vietnam was the
critical benchmark in the preparations for the Gulf -- not
just in the political debate but, as we have noted, in the
administration's and the military's preparations to achieve
media control. For Britain, the Gulf was compared with the
Falklands -- the lack of political debate and the agenda for
media control both reflected the 1982 crisis. The Labour
opposition was afraid of the political damage which
criticizing the government's war policy might have caused
them, as it was thought to have done in the Falklands case.
Nevertheless the (curiously few) opinion polls which were
taken (or publicized) before the January 16 offensive showed
a sharp division of opinion over the immediate resort to the
war option, similar to that which was evident in the USA.
This indicated a problem for the management of public
opinion, which was quickly suppressed in intensive polling
during the six weeks of the war itself, but which (our more
extensive research shows) continued to manifest itself once
a wider range of questions were canvassed. It was this
problem, we may speculate, to which the policies of
political-military news managers, and to a more problematic
extent of editors and media controllers (if not the
journalists themselves), were largely addressed.
The conformity of the media in Britain during the Gulf
War to official views was certainly overdetermined: by the
efficient US-organized coalition control of information; by
the Iraqis' own apparent censorship which blocked
information on the losses they were sustaining; by the lack
of domestic political legitimation for criticism of
coalition policy; and by a desire on the part of both media
and government to learn from their conflicts during the
Falklands war and produce an operational framework which
would preserve a degree of journalistic autonomy within a
context of military-political control. In the case of much
of the tabloid press, it was compounded by a synthetic
jingoism, seeking to reproduce (unsuccessfully, many argued,
given the very different context of the Gulf) the patriotic
aura of the Falklands war.[9] Only in some of the "quality"
papers, especially in the liberal Independent and Guardian,
were there sustained efforts to break through the "screening
off" of the realities of the war by the official control of
information, but even these publications were severely
hampered by the difficulties of access to most of the actual
"fighting."
It is beyond the remit of this paper to attempt a full
account of the processes by which the flow of information
was structured, but it is important to indicate their scope.
It is certainly arguable that British controls went further
than many: the BBC's banning of 67 popular songs and of
comedy films and series with a vaguely military theme, and
the banning by a minority channel of a series of Vietnamese
films, indicated a level of general cultural control which
went beyond the political or military censorship which was
evident in all the countries directly involved in the
conflict.[10] This was reflected in the wider cultural
establishment, for example in the Victoria and Albert
Museum's banning of an exhibition, "The Art of Death," which
included tombstones, mourning fans and funeral loaves.
The denial of death in such policies may have
reflected, as the organizer of this exhibition commented, a
"peculiarly 20th century attitude."[11] It also reflected
something more specific, however: the coalition's general
desire -- taken to extreme lengths in the UK -- to minimize
or even negate the violence of the war, by avoiding
anything, from British or US "body bags" to film of the
Iraqi victims of air attacks, which could have brought home
the reality of the war. In general, this was very
successfully achieved, at least during January and February
1991, even if it could not be so easily maintained in the
aftermath of the war.
British television, and most press, coverage of the
early phase of the war emphasized its high-technology
efficiency: film was widely shown of American fighter
pilots' describing their assaults -- "exactly like the
movies," "Baghdad was lit up like a Christmas tree. It was
tremendous!," "It was kinda neat."[12] Television news
frequently, but not always, matched this description of a
BBC bulletin: "a very muscular and loyalist affair, straight
out of Biggles[13]: our top guns on bridge- busting, Israeli
jets zapping Palestinians around Sidon, the B- 52s lumbering
into Fairford and a almost black and blank screen from
Baghdad courtesy of CNN."[14] Even the land war, with its
instant success, was widely presented in a glamorous light,
at least until the extent of the carnage was revealed. The
image of a local evening paper advertising "Land War: Sunday
Colour Special," sandwiched between billboards for a "Big
Fight Sensation" and "City Match Report," evoked the
sporting metaphor for war.[15] Cutaway diagrams of
Challenger battle tanks and F- 15E fighters covered the
center-fold of the children's supplement to a "quality"
paper.[16]
A tension had begun to develop in the television
coverage by the second week of February: the Independent
Television News bulletin, of the same evening as the BBC
report quoted above, "showed Iraqi pictures of civilian
damage and spoke of children dying, with the corrective
remark that the Iraqis had stolen the incubators from
Kuwaiti hospitals."[17] The official media campaign faltered
more decisively on 13 February, when confronted with rare
unexpected failure in the form of the bombing of the Baghdad
shelter, believed to be a military communications center, in
which hundreds of civilians were killed. It was at this
point that significant parts of the media departed in their
coverage from the smooth track which the military had
provided for them.[18] The BBC's coverage, which included
film of shrouded remains of the victims as well as a tour of
the shelter's charred interior, led to charges of treachery
from some Conservative Members of Parliament -- who dubbed
the BBC the "Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation." Here there
were shades of the conflicts of television and government
which had characterized the Falklands War.
Apart from this incident, virtually no bodies or
injured people (a few Israeli victims were probably the only
exceptions) appeared on any television screens or in any
newspapers until the war was practically over. There was
certainly little intimation, in most of the reporting, of
the real violence involved in the attacks. Video film of
missiles approaching their targets was released -- but not
the film of the horrified face of an Iraqi lorry driver a
split second away from death. The campaign was
systematically presented as an attack on things -- weapons,
transporters, bridges, buildings -- but not on people.[19]
There was a deliberate denial of the violence actually being
perpetrated on human beings. Only in the final stages of
the land war (when neither the outcome nor the duration of
the war was seriously in doubt) did the massacre of Mutla
Ridge lead to some brief snatches of gruesome realism.
There was extraordinarily little speculation about the
numbers of Iraqi military casualties until the war was over;
then US and UK military sources began to divulge their
horrific estimates of anything from 40,000 to 200,000
killed, which made their way at least into the serious
newspapers.
A further element of denial was the refusal, or
transfer, of responsibility by leaders, which was faithfully
reproduced by the British media. When American planes
bombed the bunker in Baghdad in which several hundred
civilians were killed, there were many attempts to blame
Saddam Hussein for this grisly mistake, arguing either that
he should not have placed civilians in a place which also
had a military function, or more extremely that he had
deliberately placed civilians there so as to make political
capital out of their deaths. One British newspaper
headlined this story "Victims of Saddam" -- which was true
enough at one level, but which denied any responsibility to
those who had actually launched the missiles which killed
those in the bunker.[20]
The issue of responsibility for killing and death
emerged with a vengeance, however, as a result of the
Kurdish crisis. Just as President Bush, who had called for
the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, found himself being blamed
for the slaughter of Shi'ite and Kurdish rebels by the Iraqi
army, so British Prime Minister John Major, whose first
reaction to the Kurdish tragedy had been to say that "I
don't recall asking the Kurds to mount this particular
insurrection,"[21] was forced within a week -- at least in
part by critical media coverage -- to propose Western
intervention to protect the victims of Iraqi repression.
People in Britain, as in other Western societies, were
therefore generally (but as the Kurdish case shows not
completely) insulated not only from the immediate reality
and direct threat of violence (marginal and sporadic
terrorist incidents apart), but also, to a very large
extent, from information about and images of the ways in
which these realities and threats were affecting people in
Iraq. It was not surprising in this context, and given the
plausible political case against Saddam Hussein's invasion
of Iraq (which was condemned even by opponents of the war),
that opinion polls in Britain showed massive majorities
supporting the war. An initial 80 percent level of approval
rose to around 90 percent in many polls, enabling one
newspaper to claim "an extraordinary degree of unanimity,
unprecedented in modern times towards any policy."[22]
Nevertheless, our assumption was that the lives of
people in these societies were linked by a whole set of
abstract relationships to the violence of the war. As
Giddens points out in his recent work on modernity, the
transformation of relationships of time and space means the
involvement of people in distant risks and dangers, and a
well-distributed awareness of these. "Disembedding
mechanisms" in social relations (the dislocation of social
relations from given temporal and spatial contexts) have, he
argues, "provided large areas of security," but "the new
array of risks which have thereby been brought into being
are truly formidable." The circumstances in which we live
today have as a result a "menacing appearance."[23] In the
Gulf War, many people who were not directly threatened
nevertheless felt themselves to be living with the dangerous
situation which was developing thousands of miles away.
Abstract relationships and personal involvement were not --
of course -- opposed, but interrelated[24]: some people in
Britain were living with this tension in a much more
personal way than others.
Based on these considerations, our hypotheses were,
first, that despite their "support" for the war, many people
would have responses of a more complex character to its
"distant" violence, as well as to the political issues
involved; and second, that these responses would be
structured not only by social relations reflecting
differences of age, sex, class, party identification, and
prior military/wartime experience, but also by their
exposure to different media. We reasoned that since the
media provided not only virtually all the information about
the war available to respondents (either directly or through
others), but also day-by- day interpretations of this
information, people's differential access to media resources
would play a significant part in structuring these
differences of response. In particular, we thought it
important (despite the primacy of television due to the
immediacy of its coverage) to investigate the effects of
newspaper exposure, since newspapers offered much more
detailed and far more differentiated interpretative
messages.
The Survey Research
In order to deconstruct the apparently simple
"supportive" characterization of public opinion about the
Gulf War, we planned two surveys, the first during the
aerial attack phase of the war, and the second after the
commencement of the land war. As it turned out, the first
survey was carried out during February, 1991, during the
latter half of the war, and the second in April- May, during
the immediate aftermath. The data from the first survey
were analyzed in March, 1991 and published in a research
report at the end of that month.[25] This article reports
chiefly on the data from the first survey, along with some
preliminary results from the second survey.
The surveys were based on random samples of the local
population in Hull (a Labour-voting Northern industrial
working- class city) and Beverley (its adjacent
Conservative-voting middle-class suburban area). Although
we cannot claim that the area is typical in all ways of the
population of the UK, and indeed there are some recognizable
biases in our sample (e.g., a small over-representation of
Labour voters compared to the national situation, and a
virtual absence of ethnic minorities), there was no reason
why Hull/Beverley people should have had substantially
different attitudes to the war from those of the population
nationally. Indeed, asking a question about basic
approval/disapproval of the war which had been asked by a
national poll, we too obtained 80 percent approval from our
sample, so that we can claim some correspondence between
ours and national polls. Our interest, moreover, was in
exploring relationships between different aspects of
attitudes to the war and a range of social and media
variables, rather than to engage in precise, predictive
opinion polling in the sense in which this is carried out in
(for example) electoral contexts.
Our selection of a random sample from the electoral
register avoided the recognized dangers of quota
samples[26], on which all national UK opinion polls are
based. For our first survey, mail questionnaires were sent
to 1300 people between February 7 and 11, and replies were
coded by the date of the postmark; by February 22, when a
ceasefire was imminent, we had received approximately 500
replies, giving a response rate of nearly 40 percent.
Especially given that the register we used had been compiled
in October 1989, and therefore included many who had moved
or died, this was a good response, which compares well with
other postal questionnaires in similar situations.[27]
The first questionnaire included 29 questions about the
politics of the war, perceptions of the coalition attacks,
attitudes to violence and to the media coverage, and a set
of socio-demographic and other identity questions. The
substantive questions, framed in mid-January at the very
beginning of the war, were of course asked in a general way
(in the second survey, we were able to ask far more specific
questions about events which occurred later in the
conflict). The actual questions asked in the first survey
are included in an Appendix.
For our second survey, questionnaires were sent to
approximately 400 of the original respondents (those who had
agreed to receive a second questionnaire), together with
almost 1000 additional people also drawn at random from the
same electoral register. The second questionnaires were
sent out at the end of March, one month after the end of the
war, and replies came in during April and the beginning of
May -- effectively the period of the Kurdish crisis,
although our questions, framed in advance, did not
specifically mention this. Despite the fact that the
urgency of the war itself had disappeared, our overall
response rate was still only just under 40 percent (although
lower among the new element of our sample). We have not yet
carried out a full analysis of this second survey, and only
some overall findings have been included in the discussion
below; with one exception (Table 5), the second wave data
are from only the new respondents, in order to avoid any
response bias stemming from repeated testing. (Ongoing
analyses are exploring the extent of this bias.)
Attitudes to Media Coverage
Large majorities of our first sample regularly watched
television news of the war (90 percent), read the local
evening paper (72 percent) and read a national (or regional)
daily newspaper (65 percent).[28] Clearly, the overwhelming
majority of the sample obtained their knowledge of the war
from these three media (and from radio, about which we
unfortunately did not ask questions in this survey). Of
course, it is likely that people also often obtained
information from others who were attending to these media,
and most people certainly processed their media-based
information through discussion in face-to-face situations;
yet these media were ultimately the dominant sources of
information, and exposure to them was very high. In terms
of alternative information sources, only a small minority, 5
percent, reported that a member of their immediate family
was in the Gulf, and for them there may have been some
direct (though delayed) input of information from the
theatre of war.
Overwhelmingly, people reported that they watched
television news for information, although a substantial
minority also said that they watched because they were
worried. Only 5 percent, almost exclusively younger men,
reported that they were fascinated or excited by the war.
Among those not watching television news, worry was a major
factor (especially among a few of those with family members
stationed in the Gulf), although boredom was also cited by a
few.
We asked three sets of questions directly about
television coverage. Overall, 60 percent of our respondents
found it "informative," while 25 percent found it "too
informative" and 16 percent found it "not informative
enough." However, we divided our sample between the 202 who
replied early in the conflict, before the Baghdad bunker
bombing referred to above (which as we have noted was a
landmark in the television coverage), and the 307 who
replied after this incident (in 51 cases the postmark was
illegible). We found a decline in the proportion finding
the coverage to be "too informative" (see Table 1), which
was statistically significant when "too informative" was
compared with the other two categories combined. Fewer
respondents may have complained about over-informativeness
because the coverage had become less bland, or because the
level of coverage was itself reduced from the early
saturation levels.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Table 1. Views of the informativeness of television coverage
(percentages)
Not
Too Inform- Informative
Date posted informative ative Enough N
---------------- ----------- ------- ----------- -----
On/Before 13 Feb 30 56 14 202
After 13 Feb 22 62 17 307
(Chi-square = 4.43, d.f. = 2, p = .10; with "Too informative" vs.
the other two categories combined, chi square = 4.40, d.f. = 1,
p